Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

Saint Cecilia

20090827

Saint Cecilia

My brain is like a sieve, did sing the very underrated Thomas
Dolby on a sunny day once, but today Felix suddenly had a
heroine-like-flash of memories from, what he thought were, his anarchic
student days. Try to visualise young Felix Atagong, pimple
faced jam jarred glassed weirdo who was frenetically trying to belong
somewhere, anywhere, but has always been too afraid to do so.

Caught in a crossfire of childhood and boredom, brought up in the
deep-rooted Flemish catholic tradition that it is not done to get up,
stand up for your rights, Felix’s small-town boy thoughts were a
maelstrom from the baroque and the bizarre.

Felix lost his religious beliefs somewhere between the age of twelve
and fourteen, as this was the time when he had finally realised that
magic didn’t have a place in the real world, and this included Saint
Nicholas (Sinterklaas,
the European version of Santa Claus), the mystery of transubstantiation
and the miracle of the loaves
and fish. In first grade that last miracle had been explained as
something that had really happened, but the progressive priests in
second grade tried to explain that the story had a symbolical meaning
and that no wizardry had taken place in order to multiply 5 loaves and 2
fish into a giant barbecue.

Felix’s mild condition of the ailment that is defined by torturers of
the human language as ‘pervasive
developmental disorder - not otherwise specified’ has made him
classify the outside in small wooden boxes where Schrödinger’s
cat doesn’t fit in. In Felix’s world the cat is either alive or dead
and not both simultaneously like Schrödinger maintained. To continue
this train
of thought and liaise it to the story of the 5 loaves and 2 fish;
either this is a miracle or either it is an allegory, but not both. As
there was obviously a lack of consensus regarding the loaves and fish
problem the only logical thing to do for Felix was to abandon
catholicism. The fewer boxes there are the better. Leaving catholicism
behind wasn’t such a big step, Felix thought, he had never been too
found of men in drag throwing smoke curtains around in church.

If catholicism imprinted something into little Felix’s little brain it
was a nagging sense of honesty and morality. Strangely enough the people
who openly adhered catholicism didn’t seem to behave ethical at all,
another paradox that didn’t fit into one of Felix’s small wooden boxes.

Leaving religion behind left a void into Felix’s brain although he
didn’t always realize this. So he went looking for something else, and
every time when he thought he had found something this would be
investigated very thoroughly and rather maniacally. One day it was Erich
Von Däniken’s UFO theories, another day it could be a would-be
groupie-fashion-model whose picture he had found on a record sleeve.

Europe in the seventies was a battlefield between conservatives and
progressives, left and right (paradoxically the USA were situated on the
left and the communist block on the right side of Europe). American
readers will perhaps fail to understand this, but as Europe was
literally sandwiched between capitalism and communism, we tried to
obtain the benefits of both worlds (although some countries didn’t
really have a choice).
In Europe communism (or its softer counterpart socialism) wasn’t always
frowned on as in the USA, where even the term liberalism was (and still
is) suspicious. In Europe a liberal defaults to a
right-winged-conservative although some left-liberal parties do exist or
co-exist.

Students in the Seventies didn’t take la démocratie à
l’Américaine for granted. Once too often our western
capitalistic regime ignored the democratic voice of the masses in favour
of NATO’s
(read America’s) nuclear strategy. Even today our prime minister may
neither confirm nor deny the fact that about 20 nuclear missiles are present
in Belgium and members of parliament have got no right to ask questions
about these. Master and servants.

It was no wonder that the young Felix listened eagerly to the
progressive voices that were omnipresent in the university of Louvain.
Although catholic in name the university mothered dozens of progressive
clubs whose saviours were not named Jesus Christ but Mikhail
Bakunin, Leon
Trotsky, Vladimir
Lenin and mass-murderers Joseph
Stalin and Mao
Zedong, although in those days his name was still known as Mao
Tse-Tung, a dictator famous for his poems and for his musings in the
little red book. Felix has to retrospectively confess that the
progressive movement was quite overenthusiastic regarding the Marxist
model. Western progressives were often bragging how excellent the
communist crumbles were, but they deliberately ignored the fact that the
bread was bad, the oven broken and the baker corrupt.

Then

Poor Felix didn’t quite fit in. He sneaked in at a symposium that was
organised by the anarchist collective La
Cecilia (it was not hard to spot the Belgian secret service, the
suits were the only middle aged men drinking Fanta at the bar
downstairs) but was taken aback when he found out that the participants
were merely discussing the Belgian anarchist interbellum movement or the
ideological differences between Henry
David Thoreau and Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon. Organiser was Luc
Vanheerentals, who wrote the definitive Belgian anarchist bible, and
now an independent journalist whose latest article, a hagiographic piece
about the effectiveness of the Belgian
Federal Agency for Nuclear Control, is sponsored by KBC and CERA
banks. That is how Children of the Revolution become Grannies of the
Restoration.

Felix soon discovered that intellectual left didn’t allow labourers (nor
their children) in their caste, although they kept on pretending that
the power had to be given to the masses. The left elite was as
paternalistic as the catholic priests had been and if revolution came
they would – obviously – fill the seats that mattered and do the
thinking for the proletarians. Felix still remembers the gorgeous girl
in the designer jeans who turned her back to him when she found out that
he wasn’t studying politics at the free (free as independent from church
and state) Brussels University. When she walked away he saw Lenin's
picture stitched on the back of her jacket. Felix now pities her
daughter who still has to explain why she has been named Ulrike.

In 2007 Johan Vande Lanotte, presiding the Flemish socialist party SPA,
begged the socialist movement to get the labourers back in Parliament,
as there weren’t (and still aren’t) any. Vande Lanotte, whose political
career started within extreme-left, is now a master in law and professor
at the Ghent University, and was swiftly put aside after the elections
from this year as being to radical. Labourers in parliament, the insult!

An encounter with Peter, the anarchist squatter, wasn’t really fruitful
either. Full of radical ideas Peter was a prominent follower of
proletarian shopping and was mostly seen in pubs, where he developed his
theories as long as someone else was paying for his beer. In Felix’s
wooden box proletarian shopping was regarded as stealing, even if the
stealing was done in big super-capitalistic supermarkets getting
super-profits. He simply didn’t grasp the concept how borrowing a cheap
bottle of wine from the mall would help the masses to brake their
ideological chains.

Thus the only radical action done by Felix was driving through the city
of Antwerp, on a stolen bike, without any lights on, in the opposite
direction of a one-way street, and being caught by the police. The pigs
didn’t torture him, they didn’t put him into jail, they even didn’t give
him a fine but just a kind warning to fix the light. Doesn’t add up much
on the revolutionary scale, does it?

Now

Nearly 3 decades later Felix has become salonfähig,
which is quite an expensive German word for couch potatoe, but he still
can’t help having some revolutionary thoughts from time to time, mostly
when the brown fog of Guinness has entered his brain.

Felix has always wondered how it comes that a terrorist attack on
American soil could lead to an invasion of a country that had nothing to
do with the attacks in the first place and how this event made the
greatest democracy on Earth evolve into a cheap pastiche of the Soviet
Union, including its own infamous Gulag. America’s anti-terrorist
actions reached a surrealistic zenith with the unintelligible boycott of
French fries. As if throwing a potato-stick in a 190° oily bath is an
act of freedom.

More serious is the fact that since 2001 775 human beings have been
kidnapped and deported to Guantanamo Bay. It is believed that eventually
60 to 80 of them will be put on trial, the rest will have to be set
free. Guantanamo prisoners have testified that they have been repeatedly
tortured with pepper spray, broken glass, barbed wire and burning
cigarettes, they have been chained to the floor. They were sexually
degraded and assaulted, drugged and religiously persecuted. In Iraq, in
violation with the United Nations Security Council Resolutions, 14000,
that is fourteen thousand, people were imprisoned by the US authorities
at the Abu Ghraib prison. So far the humane and democratic actions of
the land of the free.

The above stands in shrill contrast with the recent economical crisis
that didn’t come from an Afghan grotto but from offices at Wall Street
and the American monetary policy (or non-policy, if you will).
Predictions go that over 50 million jobs will be lost in 2009
alone. However, and here comes Felix’s anarchic streak again, how many
bankers have had their homes raided by US soldiers and how many have
been shot? How many have been abducted from their houses and put in
economic prison camps? How many have been waterboarded, raped or
sodomised by security contractors? How many had to stand nude in public
so that hordes of newly unemployed could have a laugh at them?

No future, did sing The
Sex Pistols once, but Felix still carries some hope. After all if
history repeats itself and if America is really turning Soviet, we may
never forget that the USSR reformed its regime through a democratic
process, although that, so told us the American propaganda machine in
the Seventies, was inexistent.

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